A Brief Stay at Flushing

Taking a break from the fourth set of Lleyton Hewitt’s five-set loss to Paul-Henri Mathieu, I marched over to Court 13 to get a look at twenty-year-old Irina Falconi. Born in Colombia, Falconi grew up in New York City and learned the game at Inwood Hill Park, perched at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Like just about every élite tennis player from Minneapolis to Moscow, Falconi moved to Florida as a teen-ager, earning a tennis scholarship to play at Georgia Tech. By the time she left Atlanta to turn pro after her sophomore year, she was the top collegiate women’s player in America.

Now she was playing in her first U.S. Open. Just by making it into the main draw—she had to win three qualifying matches last week—Falconi had already earned the biggest payday of her career: nineteen thousand dollars. That was all she would make. Falconi is a sturdy, quick player, and her groundstrokes are strong, but she was playing uphill against the tour’s nineteenth-ranked player, Flavia Pennetta, who has played in and won more matches than any player on tour this year. It barely took forty-five minutes.

About an hour later, I was walking outside Arthur Ashe Stadium when I saw a man holding a sign reading “Irina Falconi,” which I recognized as a placard from the media interview rooms. I hadn’t noticed her, and neither had any of the hundreds wandering outside Ashe, but there Falconi was, all five feet, four inches of her, standing next to her coach. She yelled to a friend—“We’re gonna watch Fed for a bit”—then posted up in front of the Jumbotron on the south end of the stadium with everyone else who didn’t have a ticket to get inside. Moments ago, she was competing in a major championship; now, just like when she went to the Open as a young New Yorker, she was an unnoticed spectator. No one approached her. She drank water from an Evian bottle and her coach held the placard and several balls used in her match. She had her souvenirs.